Firefox 4 landing 22 March

The browser war is well and truly in full swing, and Mozilla is bringing its latest weapon, Firefox 4, officially to the battle ground on 22 March.

The launch date for the stable release of the latest version of Europe's most popular browser has been pencilled in for next week (subject to any last minute major bug discoveries) just 8 days after Microsoft went live with IE9.

"Firefox 4 RC1 has received a very warm welcome; it's time to make a decision to ship," said Mozilla's Damon Sicore.

"As of now, there are no known issues that would stop us from shipping RC1 as final. At the conclusion of our regular 11:30AM triage session on Wednesday, 16 March, release drivers will decide whether to ship RC1 as Firefox 4."

Like IE9, Firefox 4 is HTML 5 suped up and offers anti-tracking tools. Unlike IE9, Firefox 4 will play nicely on Windows XP (as well as Mac OS X and Linux).